Art therapy

Art therapy views any artistic product as a means towards promoting emotional growth. It does not matter what a person produces, but rather how the person adjusts to, uses, and organizes the realities of the artistic media. The content often expresses unusual or even pathological psychological experiences. The ability to compose, to bring about the aesthetic balance of an art work, requires control over the material presented from the unconscious or preconscious.

The material represented and the methods of its representation of strong or morbid emotions are similar in the fine arts and in that of a patient undergoing therapy. The difference in their creative processes is that the artist is able to evoke emotions from inner depths and be their master while the patient and emotionally disturbed person is dominated by them and carries out their orders, unconsciously choosing the subject, the technique, the colour and the style. The symbolism in the material represented often remains hidden from the patient, while the symbols are actually manipulated by the artist to establish communication with the spectator at a different level than that of a pure description. This conscious manipulation of the symbolic makes it difficult for the artist to have sufficiently free association in the execution of his work to make art therapy successful.